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Texas To Build $4.93B Wind-Power Project
Hugh Pickens points out a story in the NYTimes about Texas' $4.93 billion wind-power transmission project. One of the major goals of the project is to improve electrical throughput to the population centers. Current transmission lines are unable to handle all of the power generated by Texas' wind fields. State citizens will be paying slightly more to help cover the cost, though the project is expected to eventually lower the cost to consumers. Quoting:
"The lines can handle 18,500 megawatts of power, enough for 3.7 million homes on a hot day when air-conditioners are running. 'The project will ease a bottleneck that has become a major obstacle to development of the wind-rich Texas Panhandle and other areas suitable for wind generation. The lack of transmission has been a fundamental issue in Texas, and it's becoming more and more of an issue elsewhere,' said Vanessa Kellogg, the Southwest regional development director for Horizon Wind Energy, which operates the Lone Star Wind Farm in West Texas and has more wind generation under development. 'This is a great step in the right direction.'"
While I am all in favor of more wind power, here's something to keep in mind: this spring the Texas control area (the organization that manages power flows in the Texas region) had an incident where the temperature stayed warm into the evening and the weather conditions were such that the wind died across the entire state. Of course the wind turbine power went to zero across the entire state as well, driving the system into yellow (risk of blackout/system collapse) and close to red before they could get enough backup gas turbines on-line.
As I said, wind is great but it needs to be backed up with hydro and probably nuclear to have a reliable system.
sPh
>..My first impulse was to be a grammer nazi, but I refrained ;-).
Gramm_a_r nazi!
Few US homes, even new ones, reach superinsulation levels of construction. for one, look at the walls, they just aren't thick enough, don't have enough space for all the insulation needed. You'll need at least, raw minimum, six-nine inches in the walls and at least a foot in the ceilings, something like that. I used to always say R55 all around, that's more or less what we used to shoot for, the linked article says now they call it R40 walls and R60 ceiling, close enough. We don't have exact legally defined codes to qualify it yet (AFAIK), but it isn't 2.5 inches that fits inside of a normal stud wall like is more common. In order to achieve really good levels of insulation you have to have planned air in and planned air out, this is actual ducting and fans and air filters, because all cracks are sealed, and there are a lot of them, and it is done in stages as the different layers of the house are built. You need an active heat exchanger for this planned air intake and exhaust. Your windows are multipane and gas filled and are not cheap, and should be smallish, and usually you would have an insulated tight fitting interior cover for the windows for real cold or hot spells. And so on. A house that achieves really good superinsulation levels can get by most of the time without much in the way of planned heating, even in the winter, as just heat from the humans in there, cooking, running lights and appliances, hot water use, etc is usually sufficient to maintain a decent enough comfort level. Anyway, there's some good engineering to it, I've worked on some, it really does work, the drop in use of air conditioning and heating is just *phenomenal*, strikingly so, I mean they just don't come on that much, you should be able to go a day or days with no activation where before your heating or cooling might be coming on several times a day, that's the difference.. Here is the wikipedia writeup on it, Superinsulation.